The next presenters in this ECREA 2014 [4] session are Susanne Almgren and Tobias Olsson, who continue the theme of user comments on online news. Digital media offer new forms of co-existence between producers and users; indeed, there is a new media ecology of participation emerging.

User-generated content has always played a part even in traditional media, of course, in the form of letters to the editor or telephone call-ins. The current environment simply makes such harnessing of user-generated content a great deal easier. Online newspapers are a particularly interesting case for this, given their long institutional history.

What is necessary here is to bring together two strands of research: the conditions of participation, and the participatory preferences of users. There remains a process of gatekeeping of user comments, and this process plays out differently across different news categories: in particular, comments on accidents and crime are more frequently filtered, for legal reasons. Similarly, users prefer to comment on specific areas of the news over others; sport and entertainment are especially important here.

How often participatory features are made available in each site will also differ, and how often users take up such offers differs for a number of reasons; there are distinctions in Sweden for example between regional and national newspapers, which regional papers seeing more user engagement. The availability and take-up of Facebook and Twitter sharing features reverses this trend, however: here, national newpaper items are shared much more often.

Further research is necessary to explore these patterns, but some very interesting observations are emerging from this.